Sarah Rastkar – Why did this code change?

The following paper has a similar aim to Yun’s, Sarah too want to support developers in understanding why their code has changed.

To find out why a certain piece of code has changed, often you need to look in many different documents places. Often you start by finding the related commit message. However, this is too fine grained, as there might be an associated task or user story or even feature request.

The solution that Sarah proposes is to gather all useful information from all these sources and summarize it in the IDE.

The solution is a special case of multi-document summarization, and relevant documents are modeled as a hierarchy chain. This helps the user to find the reason behind a code change.